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Teflonitis in Pascagoula
Trevor Butterworth, January 26, 2007
Where’s the science to show that PFOA is like asbestos?

Another chemiphobic battle has come to a head this week in Jackson Mississippi with participants staking out diametrically opposite positions. As the Sun Herald puts it

“Lawmakers on Thursday heard the chemical "PFOA" is an absolutely terrible cancer-causing agent and DuPont is practically bombarding Pascagoula with the stuff - this from residents, environmentalists and a labor union official.

Then they heard from DuPont and the Mississippi Manufacturers Association that PFOA is harmless, with "no known health effects" and the company is putting out only minuscule, couldn't-hurt-a-fly levels of it.”

Naturally enough, the horror stories related by activists trying to ban PFOA emissions are rather more media-friendly than the scientific papers and reviews which put the chemical into its proper toxicological context.

“Residents, the Sierra Club and the United Steel Workers union testified against DuPont and PFOA.

At least one resident, retired Navy Cmdr. Robert Hardy, said eight members of his family are either sick with cancer or have died from it. His wife is currently sick. He blames this on high levels of pollutants in manufacturing-heavy Pascagoula, which is rated one of the worst areas in the nation in toxic pollution and cancer rates.

"I'm not a tree-hugger," Hardy said. "But I am pragmatic, and of the school that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck... This is the next asbestosis and the next tobacco, and it's staring DuPont right in the face."

As STATS has noted, environmentalists have played extraordinarily fast, loose, and, it has to be said, dumb when it comes to the science.

As awful as the Hardy family’s predicament is, there is no science whatsoever to support the idea that their cancers are caused by PFOA. Industrial workers exposed to high levels of the chemical have been tested and retested, and no link with any illness has been demonstrated.

The charge that it is a carcinogen comes from laboratory studies involving rodents. But the kind of liver cancer produced in rats came from dosing them with 25,000 times the amount of PFOA in the bloodstream of an average American. The tumors were produced by a mode of action that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) risk assessment concluded was inapplicable to humans.

The EPA’s decision to designate PFOA as a “likely carcinogen” was based on the possibility that there might be other modes of action that might cause liver tumors and which might be applicable to humans. So far no such modes have been found.

As the EPA’s Administrator Stephen L. Johnson, stated last year,

 “Although our risk assessment activities are not complete and new data may change the current picture, to date  [the] EPA is not aware of any studies specifically relating current levels of PFOA exposure to human health effects.”

(See the EPA’s information page on PFOA)